Sacred reminder of milestones

Last week was the 30th birthday of the Midweek. I appreciated being invited to the celebration of this milestone. Something that didn't exist was "born" 30 years ago and the creativity, care and energy of real people keeps it thriving still.
As a left-wing young feminist, for many years I shunned the whole business of birthdays as just another empty ceremony that gets taken over by commercialism. However, once I experienced giving birth, a whole lot of staunch attitudes and conditioned beliefs were simply washed away by the compelling miracle of birth. When we are part of the birthing process (as either the mother giving birth or someone attending), everything, and I mean everything, is put into a different perspective. Life with a capital L is showing us something that we cannot ignore. We are invited to witness something extraordinary: the coming into existence of a new human being. This is a unique expression of life, deeply individual and yet also linked to the whole web of life. We need to drop all our usual conditioned responses and priorities and agendas and bear with the rhythm and the timing of the arrival of this new life.
Anything that cuts through all our usual ways is powerful, potentially becoming a potent messenger of what is most important to us. You could use the term a "sacred reminder".
In our culture death is an unpopular, almost taboo topic. And yet death also has a huge amount to teach us about life. Remembering our mortality and therefore our death is deeply woven into Buddhism which is where mindfulness has its origins. So much so, that it is a common practice for Asian Buddhist monks to be invited into morgues to spend time with bodies. Although this seems morbid, if not downright weird to our cultural conditioning, it is intended as a stark reminder. A reminder, directly through the senses, not to delay the need to wake up now from this common human trance-like tendency to keep putting off our life until conditions are more to our liking. So often some of our wisest reminders that life is to be lived NOW come from people who are near to death, both from their own re-prioritising of their deepest values and from the impact their impending loss has on our own lives. We simply do not know when change/loss/separation/illness or death may take away so many gifts and possibilities that we may be taking for granted in our life right now.
Our mind seems to have an almost unlimited capacity to fool us into imagining we are going to live forever (very strange when you think about, given that we pride ourselves on having such rational minds!).
This is understandable in young people where their life appears to stretch before them into a far away horizon. And yet even as we become older and see our own "horizon" approaching much more closely, we still have this peculiar tendency to keep postponing our "real life", and allowing the very real life in front of us to elude us through fantasy, and escapes of all kinds.
So, these days I fully embrace celebrating birthdays and attending funerals, allowing the joyful celebration in the case of birthdays, and the sorrowful appreciation of funerals to bring their deeper message of the preciousness of life to touch me at a cellular level. This helps me to keep re-orientating my life to reflect my deepest values.
Annie Chapman is a certified Yoga teacher and massage therapist with a daily Yoga and meditation practice. She teaches Yoga and mindfulness at Balance Whanganui, and also teaches out in the community as a facilitator for Mindfulness Works, a nationwide Mindfulness training company.
The next Whanganui four-week Introduction to Mindfulness & Meditation course begins on July 14. To book: mindfulnessworks.co.nz/an-introduction-to-mindfulness-meditation-4-week-course-Whanganui/
Annie will be leading her last offering in Whanganui before heading north in August: a day-long retreat on July 16, Finding Self-Compassion in a Fast-paced World. For more info email anniechapman@actrix.co.nz
¦ For info re Mindfulness and Yoga at Balance Whanganui please email linda@balancewhanganui.org.nz